IPTV and 'Firestick' hacking
As per the title, is anyone into hacking about with Firestick devices and getting some world free IPTV?
Essentially it's just Kodi with plugins and Add-ons, and they're generally just python scripts anyway.
I've just fallen down this rabbit hole after a friend said he'd gotten a Firestick off a bloke down the pub for £75 for the year. He said its Sky Glass and loads of box sets and what not.
A quick inspection and it's not Sky Glass, it's a custom skin for an IPTV player. The box sets are a mix of Real Debrid links and what looks to be the Eupherium plug in which uses torrents. Straight away I threw a VPN on his stick with the killswitch enabled.
Anyway, I decided to see what I could with basics on my own Firestick for free. I used Kodi, Eupherium, The Crew's Daddy Live, The Loop, and a sports plug in. I managed to set up Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for most of it. I used Surfshark from the get go as this is all dodgy, but it's purely for experimental purposes.
It's great doing this for free but there are some downsides:
Channels are hit and miss whether they are even near HD quality. Streams are often low fps and you need to rely on interpolation on the TV to smooth the stream out.
Kodi often crashes during use or startup requiring a cache clearance.
Steams change often. They can be great one day, the next that IPTV is dead and you need to pick another which may or may not work.
I realise there is a whole underground network for private streams and people are making serious bank selling these for PPV access alone.
What are people's thoughts on all of this? I work in the TV industry and it's bad for businesses, but at the same time, there are far too many fat cats around making this industry drown.
Low quality has kept me away from IPTV for ages. I've been on and use private trackers for ages, I'd rather have full quality. It's funny because half the stuff I pirate I also pay for, but every streaming site nowadays applies some level of down-sampling despite my >1gbps bandwidth being more than capable of handling the full quality stream 🤷♀️
That, and I can use one search bar and instantly pull up every title without having to first figure out what service has it this week, or if they have all the episodes/seasons. Often with better subtitles.
The miniscule time spent downloading instead of streaming is heavily compensated by that simple feature.
That and I can then copy it onto a USB stick and plug it into my projector instead of needing to run a wire.
I get m3u playlists of global channels from an old satellite-hacking forum. As you described, the quality of these temporary thieved-from-thieves streams is hit or miss at best. I would in no way want to rely on them for entertainment or education on current events. Their use as such seems relegated to nations like Brazil and Argentina where affordable availability of more legal methods is nowhere to be seen.
That said, it's a wonderful curiosity. Being able to bounce around through thousands of TV channels from all over the world is pretty magical. The sheer amount of amusement in seeing how diverse cultures put on TV productions is worth the tech nightmare of getting it to work. I'm especially fond of local broadcast channels in India and the Middle East; religion is a central cultural focus there and it colors every last frame in exotica.